


You Surrender Your Heart

by dapatty, uglowian



Category: Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Challenge Response, Community: pt-lightning, F/M, M/M, Multi, PT-Lightning Challenge: Round 2, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 07:12:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1156648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dapatty/pseuds/dapatty, https://archiveofourown.org/users/uglowian/pseuds/uglowian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an alternate universe loosely inspired by American Hustle, in which Tess is a runaway with an invented life and Danny and Rusty aren't quite as successful or as glamorous as they might have been.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Surrender Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> written for round 2 of the pt_lightning challenge. 
> 
> many many thanks to patty and to sunshine_queen for betaing and cheerleading. <3

  
**Download Links:** (Right click, Save As) [mp3](http://podfic.jinjurly.com/audfiles/292014020101.zip) | [m4b](http://podfic.jinjurly.com/audfiles/292014020102.zip)  


_Everybody wants the things they can’t have._

 

That’s what Danny told her, shortly after their first meeting—before she’d known enough to wonder what kind of person had the last name Ocean.

 

 -

 

People have told her a lot of things throughout the years.  She’s learned to shrug most of them off.  People—men, especially—like hearing themselves talk.  The trick to bearing it is just to smile and let their words pass over you like water.

 

It took her a long time to figure that out.

 

And no matter what she knows now, there are still some words that have their hooks in her, that crawled under her skin before she got very good at smiling even when she didn’t mean it.

 

 _Life doesn’t happen all at once_ , her mother used to say when she complained of boredom, of impatience, of the certainty that she was meant to be anywhere but Lake City, Minnesota.  The aphorism never cured her of any of that, of course—it just nagged. A useless admonishment, reminding her that she was ungrateful while she lay in bed, paging through the same beatup book on Jasper Johns that she’d had out of the library for a year.

 

Of course life doesn’t happen all at once.  She knew that then and she knows that now.

 

But she still hears the words sometimes. Still feels them, settled deep within her bones, promising her that she hasn’t listened, no matter how much she thinks she understands.

 

She hates it.

 

When she was eighteen, she threw her clothes, her plastic bag full of cash, and that stolen Jasper Johns book in a rucksack and she bought a Greyhound ticket to the farthest city she could get to, and she told herself she would never look back.

 

When she was eighteen and a half, and sick, and sad, and scared her landlord would evict her for the three months of rent she couldn’t pay, she clung to the one thing that her mother never told her, the only words that she ever said as a promise to herself:

 

 _Get up.  Keep running. You can be anything you want_.

 

Of course, she didn’t know _what_ she wanted then—but she supposed if she didn’t end up homeless, she’d have time to figure it out.

 

After all, she thought sardonically, life didn’t happen all at once.

 

-

 

“Stop thinking so loudly.”

 

She glances at Rusty who grins at her around the rim of his glass.  The brandy catches the light for an instant, dazzling amber, before he tips it back and swallows.

 

“I’m not thinking,” she says.

 

He snorts and sets his glass down with a clink.  “You’re always thinking.  Since the first day that I met you.”

 

“And you aren’t?”

 

He touches a strand of her hair.  “Touché.”

 

His hand falls away and she doesn’t shiver.  She likes to think she’s honest with Rusty—more honest than she’s ever been with anyone, maybe, but “more honest” and “completely honest” are entirely different things.  Maybe she never lies to Rusty, but she never quite managed to tell the whole truth, either. 

 

“Dance with me?” she says.

 

He laughs. The barlights limn his shoulders and his hair.  They walk together to the open floor, and the song sounds familiar, but not anything she knows by name.  They fall in step.

 

“He’ll be okay,” Rusty says.

 

She can feel the vibrations of his voice in his chest.

 

She closes her eyes and tips her head to his shoulder. 

 

“I know,” she tells him.

 

They sway in time. The music croons.  For a while, she nearly forgets about Danny.

 

-

 

She met Daniel Ocean for the first time on a sidewalk in Atlantic City.

 

She was twenty-three and sharper than she had been when she left Minnesota.   But she was still in the crucible—her skin hadn’t hardened over yet.  Sometimes she wonders if she wishes it had.  She might never have noticed Danny, then.

 

She hugged her arms around herself when another taxi flew by, paying no attention to her hailing.  Her breath went away from her in white screens.

 

“Not your lucky night.”

 

He startled her—but she’d learned, by then, never to jump.  A glance to the left, and she saw him.  He was handsome even in the flat, sallow glow of the streetlamp.

 

“Guess not,” she agreed, and smiled a little.

 

“Klimt?” he said, nodding to her clutch.

 

It had _The Kiss_ embroidered on it.  A tacky repro, she thought, but she was seeing someone who’d bought it for her, and it had never killed her to stroke an ego.  Still, that he knew enough to name it surprised her.

 

“Yeah.”  She thumbed the garish thread.  “Most people don’t notice.”

 

That earned her a slanted smirk so smug that she half expected him to drop a line like _I’m not most people_.  But he didn’t.  She wonders if that’s what made him interesting.

 

“You like art?” he asked.

 

“Only in the right company.”

 

He laughed.

 

A cab drew closer.  Before she could move, he stepped out into the street, hand outstretched.  The cab pulled close.

 

“Where to?” Danny asked.

 

“Azure,” she said, “on Boardwalk.”

 

He held the door open for her.  Took her hand to help her in.  “Maybe we’ll run into each other again.”

 

She laughed.  “Maybe.”

 

“I’m Danny.”

 

“Tess.”

 

“Have a good night, Tess.”

 

He swung the door shut.  Something itched against her wrist.  By the time she fished the card out of the cuff of her coat-sleeve, the cab had rounded a corner and Danny was gone.

 

She thumbed the name _Daniel Ocean_ and smiled to herself, wondering what kind of jackass carried business cards around with just a name and number on them.

 

-

 

Eventually, she will tell people that her husband is an independent contractor.

 

Like so many other aspects of her life, it’s not a lie so much as it’s a feat of omission.  People assume he has something to do with construction and she doesn’t correct them.

 

Give people just enough of the truth that they build their own reality.

 

She learned that one long before she met Danny.

 

In spite of this, he gave her the whole truth well before they were married—in all its breathless detail.  Not that he sounded breathless when he told her; he was languid, lazy, tracing circles on her wrist.  As though forgery, hustling, impersonation, and fraud were all normal parts of life.

 

“Why are you telling me this?” she wanted to know.

 

His fingers stilled, his hand over hers.  They were sharing a hotel room that he’d paid for, and in retrospect she supposes that she must have known something was off about him, even before his confession.  Most people couldn’t just pick up rooms like this in the middle of Manhattan.

 

She supposes, too, that if she’d known, she must not have cared.  She had followed him over that threshold, after all.

 

He studied her.  “I like you,” he said.

 

“So you tell me you’re a con man?”

 

“Contractor, actually.  I provide my services to people with broader…business models, I guess—and I get paid.”

 

“Why do you do it?”

 

He smirked a little.  “Everything else is too boring.”

 

“That’s ridiculous.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because you’re lying to people.”

 

A shrug.  The rustling of the sheets.  “You’re lying, too.”

 

“I am not.”

 

He arched an eyebrow.  “I’ve met girls who went to Vassar, Tess; I know how people think when they feel the need to announce that they’ve been _classically trained_.  Whatever those hotshots at your gallery think you did to get where you are, we both know they’re wrong.  But you don’t stop them from thinking it.”

 

She pulled her hand out from under his.

 

“You let them think it,” he continued, “and now you’re here.  And you got what you wanted.  There’s nothing wrong with that.”

 

The paternalism stung.  Or maybe it was just the fact that he had the gall to think he could tell her that she had what she wanted.  She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.  For a reason she couldn’t pin down yet, she felt so stupid.

 

“You don’t know anything about what I want.”

 

He sighed.  “Tess.”

 

“Don’t.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

She looked at him again; at how his hair, disheveled, fell into his face; at those dark eyes that watched her with a look that she could only think to describe as _plaintive_.  And even though he irked her, she wanted to reach out and thumb his bottom lip, or trace a line down his throat, right to the hollow where she knew, already, her fingers would rest perfectly.

 

“How do I know you’re not lying to me?” she asked him.

 

“About being sorry?”

 

“About everything.  And anything.  Is your name really Danny Ocean?”

 

His mouth quirked into a smile less smug than bleak.  “It is for now.”

 

“And should I expect you to disappear one day?  Is that how these things work?”

 

“They do, sometimes.  I was hoping this could be different.”

 

Different how, she wanted to ask.  How can you expect one facet of your life to change while all the rest of it stays the same?  If you’ve been running your whole life, you don’t just suddenly stop.  Things don’t work that way.  She knew from experience.

 

But she let the words settle against the back of her throat, unspoken.  She just watched him watch her while the quiet spread out between them and she wondered if wanting to trust him made her moronic, pathetic, or both.

 

“I don’t know, Danny…”

 

“Look, Tess—I’m not disappearing anywhere.  I always want to come back to you.”

 

And that was, and is, the thing about Danny.  He lives in a world writ large and full of pathos.  He thinks in broad strokes, paints in bright splashes, and when she stands beside him, she can see the thrill of it all, can believe in the complete picture, even though he’s given no consideration to the details. 

 

 _I always want to come back to you_ was never a lie, she knows that now—the problem was (and, again, is) that he took for granted that he’d go at all and that she’d want to wait, and wait, for him to come back.

 

She hates waiting.

 

But she wanted him.  Or she wanted to believe what he believed.  She doesn’t know, and the difference probably doesn’t matter.

 

“I can give it a try,” was all she said.

 

Danny smiled his charming smile.  She let him kiss her and kiss her until she felt lightheaded and weightless.  His hand traveled down the slope of her belly.  His fingers curved between her legs.

 

Her breath hitched against his mouth.

 

-

 

This is the third time Danny’s been to prison.

 

The fourth, really, but the third time since they’ve been married.

 

She stood on the curb, awash in the blare of the sirenlights.  Danny looked at her as they shoved him into the cruiser and she felt as still and cool as ice.

 

Years ago, she would have called Rusty.  She did, the first time.

 

 _Danny’s gone,_ she said.  Her hand shook but her voice was steady, flat, like she was blaming him. 

 

Maybe she was.

 

_Tess._

_He’s gone—_

_Tess.  Make some tea.  Go lay down. I’ll talk to you when I see you._

He didn’t say when he’d see her, and he didn’t tell her not to talk specifics on the phone—but he hung up before she could say anything more.  She sussed out all those unspoken warnings later, as the night deepened.

 

She didn’t call after this third time (third time for her, fourth time for Danny—and for Rusty, too, she’s fairly certain. It’s funny, the things she knows, now).  She only turned around and went back up—up, up, to their apartment, into the stratosphere.  Through their bedroom window, she watched LA glitter in the night.

 

It wasn’t until the next morning that she picked up the phone.

 

“Let’s get drinks tonight?”

 

Rusty chuckled. She could imagine him, legs kicked up on an empty poker table.

 

“Yeah,” he said.  “The usual place?”

 

“The usual place.”

 

-

 

She never called the number on that business card.

 

She forgot all about Danny Ocean in the midst of cocktail waitressing, party drifting, and spinning out stories about who she was and where she came from.  She smiled better, at that point; it became her glamour.  People asked fewer questions when she smiled. She charmed her way into a gallery assistant position because she could smile (never mind what she actually knew, or what she was actually capable of doing), and it was there, in the middle of an opening, that Danny suddenly reentered her life.

 

“Tess, right?”

 

She looked up.  The man beside her was tall and blond in a dusty way that made her think of sky country and open roads.

 

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “Have we met?”

 

“No.”  He smiled, handing her a flute of champagne.  “I’m Rusty and, uh.  This is probably more than slightly ridiculous, but my friend is all embarrassed about coming to talk to you, so I’m here.  Talking for him.”

 

He had a tapered blazer on.  White, over a black dress shirt.  He looked underdressed, but in an insouciant way, almost as though he was daring someone to care.  It should have been irritating, that kind of pointless arrogance, and maybe it was—but it didn’t stop her from asking:

 

“Your friend, huh?”

 

He nodded towards a cluster of people gathered around a textile installation.  “Yeah, right there.  Danny.”

 

As if on cue, he turned to them, saw her looking, and raised his glass.  It took her a minute to place him, to drift back to that chilly corner in Atlantic City, but when she did, she blinked in surprise. Rusty chuckled.

 

“I bet him a hundred bucks that I could convince you to say hi to him, since he wouldn’t come over and say hi himself.”

 

“A hundred bucks? Do you generally go around putting a cash value on other people?”

 

“Nah.”  He sipped his champagne.  “I just like to know what my stakes are.”

 

She studied him and then she looked back at Danny who was doing a commendable job of studying the art in front of him.

 

“So your stakes are a hundred dollars.”

 

“I’d have gone higher if I thought he could afford to lose.”

 

She laughed.  “And what’s in it for me?”

 

Rusty shrugged.  “What do you want?”

 

“Your hundred dollars.”

 

She passed her glass back to him and walked over to Danny with casual ease.

 

-

In some other life, Danny would have been incredible—robbing banks, museums, casinos, and doing it in style.  She has no doubt.  He dreams big enough, he wants relentlessly.  In a world with fewer rules and better orchestration, Danny could have been unstoppable.

 

She supposes she could have been different, too.  In different circumstances, she could have run, and run, and run, until her running burnt through all her wanting and she attenuated into stardust and delirious joy.

 

But she was born in Lake City, Minnesota and this is a life of unfortunate strictures and unhappy consequences and her husband is in jail again.

 

When they’re finished at the bar, Rusty walks her back to her apartment without her asking and without him offering.

 

It’s a strange mutuality they’ve found, she supposes.  A state of trust and of caring, keeping each other safe while they teeter on the precipice, waiting for Danny all over again. 

 

Were she some outside observer bearing witness to the two of them, she supposes she’d dismiss it all as a desperate act—and maybe it is.  After all, they wouldn’t be who they are if it weren’t for desperation; they wouldn’t, she suspects, need Danny if they didn’t sense that same desperation in him.

 

As they walk down the street, their shoes click in time on the shimmering pavement and she has Rusty’s arm looped around her shoulders, her fingers laced through his. He rolls a toothpick around in his mouth, corner to corner, and keeps his gaze fixed straight ahead, looking mildly amused at absolutely nothing.  The nightlife flows past them in distant arcs and even in the polluted light of the Los Angeles nighttime, he seems to shimmer.

 

“You’re still thinking,” he remarks as they reach her building.

 

“I’m just tired.”

 

As soon as she says it, she realizes how incredibly true it is.  A weariness curls in all the hollow spaces between her bones and she wants nothing more than to sleep.

 

“C’mon,” says Rusty. “Let’s go upstairs.”

 

In her bedroom, she peels her clothes off down to her underwear and, after a moment of consideration, discards her bra as well.  Rusty just lies on the turned down bed, not quite watching her, though he extends his hand when she flicks out the lights and crawls onto the mattress.

 

“You don’t want to change?” she asks, tucking herself against him.  “You can wear whatever out of Danny’s closet.”

 

Of course, he knows this already.

 

“Maybe in a while,” he says, sounding sleepy.

 

“Okay.”

 

His fingers thread through her hair, carding up to the base of her skull.  There, he draws little patterns and her hair falls over his hand, and the pillow, like skeins of silk.

 

Her breath evens out.  She works her hand up under his untucked shirt.  She falls asleep running her thumbnail over the fine hairs just below his navel.

 

-

 

Danny took her to Martha’s Vineyard once, when they were still courting and she was still figuring out that grand gestures were his way of showing affection (and also—she’d learn later—his way of saying he was sorry). 

 

She remembers that he took her to a cottage on the shore and presented her with a blank book, fine brushes, and a box full of gouaches.

 

“In case you get bored,” he said with a grin.

 

“Danny…”

 

That little box of supplies moved her more than the cottage and the seashore ever could.  She ran her fingers over the brushes, suddenly overcome.

 

He spoke into the silence.  “I had to hunt around a bit—I admit I don’t know much about brand quality.  But I figured you’d like it?” 

 

Tucking a curl of his hair behind his ear, she smiled up at him and felt something bright and painful brimming in her chest.  “I do like it.  Thanks.”

 

She painted through half the pages in the book that week.  The days drifted by in whitelighted calm.  When she thinks about it now, the sound of the sea, seething, seething, just beyond the cottage walls, permeates her memories.  She remembers waking before Danny and laying in bed, matching her breath to the sound of the tide.

 

More clearly than anything else, though, she remembers their third morning in that whitewashed cottage.

 

As the sun came up, she nosed his jaw.  Counted with her fingertips the ridges of his spine. “Tell me about Rusty,” she murmured against his skin.

 

Head rested against that white, white bedding, Danny made a bleary sound.

 

“What about him?” he asked, his voice still gravelly from sleep.

 

Back then she had never seen Rusty without Danny, when she saw him at all.  He appeared on the fringes of her life, usually just before Danny went away for a long stretch of time.  The bright counterpart to Danny’s dusky presence.

 

It was strange to watch them together.  They shared a body language and a gravity that she only really noticed after they were gone, vanished into _confidence_ , leaving her with time to wonder why she waited, what she wanted, why it mattered.

 

She’d seen him just before they left for this trip. A dazzling shadow, delivering Danny to her apartment and nodding his greeting to her from the hall.

 

“He’s all yours,” Rusty said with a wink, and she was startled to find herself thinking _don’t lie to me_.

 

In the bed, she felt Danny’s back rise and fall with each breath.

 

“I don’t know,” she said.  “Just tell me about him.”

 

Danny _hmm_ ’d and she felt that, too.

 

“It’s a long story,” he murmured.  “I’ve known him half my life.”

 

“And you trust him.”

 

“I do. He keeps me out of trouble.”

 

Danny’s eyes drifted shut when she moved her hand to trace his brow and the high angle of his cheekbone.

 

She knows what that means now (knows that Rusty pays attention to the little things, the snags that, if left unattended, would have landed Danny in prison a million times over), but at the time she thought Danny was speaking purely out of affection.

 

Affection.

 

She thought of Rusty again, in the hallway, and it made her vaguely sad to imagine the shape of his shared history with Danny.

 

“He keeps you out of trouble,” she echoed.  “So you can always come back.”

 

At that, Danny’s eyes opened.  He looked at her, searching for something.  Her fingers carded through his hair.

 

“Yeah,” he agreed, finally.  “So I can always come back.”

 

She felt herself smile and thought of the little tin of gouaches; heard the ceaseless, sucking sound of the sea.  The day grew bluer and brighter and pushed them closer to the end of something.

 

She thought of Rusty again, smiling on the other side of her doorway.

 

Waiting somewhere for Danny.

 

-

 

The second time that Danny went to prison, she lived in Albuquerque where the huge skies and the baked earth seemed like an alien landscape entirely unlike any place she’d ever been.

 

The second time that Danny went to prison, she only wondered what it was about him that had made her give him a second chance and she felt her skin grow thicker.

 

The second time that Danny went to prison, Rusty materialized out of the desert sunset, chewing on a string of licorice.  

 

He smiled wide and asked _you wanna take off_?  She thought of Danny standing in the doorway of the house that she’d allowed him into.  _I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes_ , he said, cut out in silhouette against the dazzle of the afternoon.  She thought of how she watched him go and how, as the sun sank lower and the shadows grew longer, she knew he wasn’t coming back.

 

And she looked at Rusty and said _yes_.

 

They drove for Colorado.  She glanced over at him and saw him watching the road ahead, not smiling or smirking or laughing at all.  He kept one hand on the steering wheel and, with the other, twisted a sunbleached bit of hair over his fingers.  In that instant, he looked like someone who kept moving just to outpace the indignity that followed needless injury.

 

 _Oh_ , she thought, and looked back out her own window.

 

Two days later, they were in a rundown hotel with forged papers and fake names and a duffle bag full of cash they couldn’t spend.  She sprawled on a bed that creaked every time she moved.  Head hanging over the edge of the mattress, she reached her legs up, peddling her idle boredom into thin air.  The sound of the shower hissed through the bathroom door.

 

As she drifted through memories of New York and thoughts of Johns, Rembrandt, and Saville, a realization dawned on her.  As much as Rusty was running from the wake of Danny’s recklessness, he was watching her.  Making sure she didn’t scramble away where Danny couldn’t follow.

 

Because she’d done that once already.

 

Federal agents came for Danny three months after they were married.  Rusty found her two days later in the bedroom of their Manhattan apartment, tying the sash of her jacket tight around her waist and reaching for the only piece of luggage she intended to take with her.

 

“Tea didn’t help you calm down?” he remarked.

 

She didn’t start or flinch at the sound of his voice. Her hands went still on the tails of her sash.

 

“How’d you get in here?”

 

He held up a key.  “Danny gave me a copy when he leased the place.  Contingency plans.”

 

She could have screamed at that, she remembers.  She could have shrieked, just to make sure he knew how furious she was, how much she hated him, hated Danny, hated everything they did if only because it meant that she always ended up as the collateral damage.

 

Instead, she curled her lip a little.  Showed some small cut of teeth.

 

“Most people just knock.”

 

“I was worried you wouldn’t answer.”

 

She crossed her arms.  “Why are you here, Rusty?”

 

“To talk you out of making a bad decision.”  His gaze flitted to her compact luggage piece.

 

She grabbed the little bag and hoisted, shoving past him.  “Don’t talk to me about bad decisions.” 

 

In the back of her mind, she took an inventory: her passport, her wallet, all of it was folded into the carry-on.  When her body brushed Rusty’s, there’d have been nothing for him to lift.

 

“Tess.” She heard him follow her into the hallway.  “Tess, don’t do this.”

 

Her hand hovered over the handle of the front door.  The apartment settled all around them, amber in the fading light.

 

“What difference does it make to you?” she asked, studying the sudden flash of brightness on her ring finger.  Her wedding ring.

 

“It’ll kill him.”  There was an edge in Rusty’s voice, like he believed what he was saying and it hurt him.

 

She supposed there was a reason he was a con man.

 

“What _should_ I do?” she snapped. “Wait?  I don’t love him that much.”

 

“You married him,” he stated blandly, and it sounded more like an accusation than anything he’d ever said to her before.

 

She jerked the door open and stormed away, and something in her hardened, even as the fragile architecture of her life collapsed.

 

But now here she was on a bed in Colorado, doing the same thing over again, albeit by slightly different means.

 

Listening to the water’s hiss, she imagined Rusty beneath the shower spray, just on the other side of that door. She thought _I could get up, take the money, and go_ —go back to New York, with her falsified records and her new name. She could go anywhere and be anyone, just like she’d done before.

 

But she didn’t.  She stayed right where she was, walking her fingers over her hipbones, wondering what her life would have become had she slammed the door in Danny’s face when he showed up ten months ago, promising her that this time would be an adventure.

 

The ceiling fan turned and turned in its lazy revolutions.

 

The showersounds ceased.

 

When Rusty emerged from the bathroom with only a towel slung low and unconcerned around his hips, she looked at him.  Beads of water dotted his shoulders, his chest, the hard plane of his belly, and her mouth parted, only just.

 

She closed her eyes.

 

In that dark, listening to the rustles of his movement, she settled into the truth that she supposed she’d always known.  She thought of Danny’s hands at the small of Rusty’s back and of Rusty’s mouth open against Danny’s, gasping and laughing all at once.  She detailed for herself Rusty’s eyes sliding shut when Danny mouthed along his jaw and down his throat, and gripped his hand over Rusty’s hip.

 

When she looked at him again, Rusty was threading a belt through his jeans, his tattoo snaking down the length of his arm.  She didn’t stop watching this time and low in her gut, a longing gathered, heavy, and profound.

 

-

 

On that same journey, they ended up in New Orleans, in a slightly nicer room in a nicer hotel, with a balcony whose aluminum balustrades had been painted to look like wrought iron.  On that balcony, she made a step towards honesty.

 

“All I ever wanted was to run,” she said, watching the sky deepen into dusk. “When I was a kid I used to think—there’s this bright horizon and I can reach it if only I keep running.”

 

Rusty, leaning on the balustrades beside her, watched her patiently, sucking on some kind of peppermint candy.  Beyond him she could see the city winking into life; a sudden spray of tiny lights around him, like a nimbus.

 

“I still want it, I think,” she continued.  “Get up.  Keep running.  Be anything you want to be.”

 

He nodded, like that made sense.  “But?”

 

“But then I met Danny.  And no matter how hard I try, I can’t keep running.”

 

The susurrus of laughter, music, and traffic drifted up to them and Rusty kept on watching her.  The dusk deepened.

 

“Why are you telling me?” he asked.

 

That surge of longing—of _wanting_ —returned and she couldn’t look at him anymore.

 

She dropped her gaze down to her hands, terror congealing cold in her gut; maybe she had misjudged.  Maybe she had mistaken desire for a kindred sense of knowing.  She looked at the knuckles of her steady, steady hands.

 

“I just—” She exhaled.  “What would you do if I tried to run?”

 

Rusty pushed off the balustrades and walked back towards the door.  “You won’t,” he said before he disappeared across the threshold.

 

Her ears felt hot; she gripped the balcony railing and looked up at the darkening sky.

 

When she went back into the room, she found that Rusty hadn’t bothered to turn on any of the lights.   He laid on his bed in the bluish gloom and the castoff glow of the citylights lanced over him, catching on his hips, his throat, and the fringes of his eyelashes.  She thought of saints in chiaroscuro and felt embarrassed and ridiculous.

 

He made no move to acknowledge her, even when she sat on the edge of his bed, her back to him, the tips of their fingers just touching on the coverlet.  A breeze came through the open balcony door and tickled against her face.

 

“I still wonder what would have happened to me, if I’d met you before Danny.”

 

In the dark behind her, Rusty exhaled.  “Why?”

 

“Because I’m so mad at him for making me wait, and I can’t tell if I. If this…” She sucked the inside of her cheek so hard it hurt.  She felt, without moving, the specific geometries of Rusty’s fingertips.  “I don’t know if this is me trying to run, trying to hurt him, or if it’s just—a conflict of interests.”

 

He laughed at that, though not unkindly.  It made her turn to look at him. His eyes were open and studying her.

 

“A conflict of interests?” he repeated.  “Is that what you’re calling it?”

 

“What should I call it?”

 

He shrugged.  He didn’t stop studying her.  “Tess.  If you’d met me first, you would have ended up meeting Danny.  In the long run, we’d still have our _conflict of interests_.”

 

“A zero sum game,” she said quietly, dropping her gaze to the coverlet.

 

“It doesn’t have to be,” he answered.

 

She thought of herself at eighteen, sitting on a Greyhound bus, dreaming of a bright horizon.  She moved her hand to trace the slopes of Rusty’s knuckles, and she thought of Danny, wonderful and selfish (and somehow never jealous), coming back to something whole.

 

“I hate waiting,” she said quietly.

 

Rusty turned his hand over, his palm open to her touch.  “I know,” he said, and it sounded like an apology.

 

She kissed him and the city surged somewhere beneath them, rushing with life.

 

-

 

She wakes to the smell of coffee and the silver sounds of cutlery clattering.

 

Rusty.

 

She finds an oversized old t-shirt and goes to him.

 

“Morning,” he says when he sees her.

 

“Hey.”

 

“Coffee?”

 

“Please.” She watches him pour it, steaming and black, and then goes to take it.  “Thanks.”

 

“Sure.  You hungry?”

 

“Not really.”

 

“All right.”

 

He’s eating cereal straight out of the box, fishing little honeyed o’s out of plastic and tossing them into the air, making a game of catching them with his mouth.  She leans against the counter, sipping her coffee and watching him.  His bare feet make quiet sounds against the tiling and her thoughts drift.

 

She finds it curious that she isn’t mad at Danny this time.  In the place of anger, there is only quiet, cold and dark. A matter of fact.

 

“What’s the plan?” she asks after a while.  “Are we leaving?”

 

Rusty halts enough to look at her.  The morning light falls in pale shafts through the kitchen and catches in his eyes and turns them lucent, like blue glass.

 

“Not this time,” he says.  “Not unless you want to.  There’s nothing to incriminate you on this, and Danny’s lawyer is very good.”

 

She knew all this, but none of it really answers the question she’s not quite asking. 

 

To Rusty’s credit, she supposes that there was a time when good lawyers and a thousand fail-safes might have made her feel better.  When she might have been worried about incrimination in the first place.  She wonders when that stopped.

 

“I see.” She tips her coffee to her mouth again.

 

“Tess.”

 

Rusty sets the cereal box down, stepping in close, not quite hemming her in against the counter.  He takes her face in his hands and thumbs over the curve of her jaw—and for half an instant, her breath halts.  But she holds her coffee cup; she keeps still.

 

“This isn’t as bad as it could be,” he says. “He’s coming back.”

 

“He always comes back,” she tells him.  “I know that part.”

 

“So what is it?”

 

He looks so unlike the Rusty that he presents to the world.  His hair, still messed from sleeping, needs a wash.  The shirt he slept in hangs unbuttoned from his shoulders and she can see his clavicle, those wings of bone swooping back, drawing profound lines beneath his skin.  The sense that they are somehow incomplete like this stings in her chest.

 

“I don’t know. I just…want something.”

 

Rusty says nothing. In the morning light, he looks spun from gold.

 

She huffs a hollow laugh.  “Same shit, different day.”

 

“Tess.”

 

Feeling foolish, she looks down at her coffee then turns away from him, setting the mug down on the white countertop.  After a moment, Rusty wraps his arms around her and tucks his face into her hair.

 

The morning brightens all around them.  She listens to him breathe.

 

-

 

When she ran to Albuquerque, she gave up on legitimate galleries; she dealt in forgeries just as well, and at two-times the pace.  She became a criminal in her own right a year before Danny found her. 

 

In the ten months she spent with Danny, willing herself to believe that this time would be different, she never told him what she’d done—but she told Rusty who shook his head, and chuckled, and muttered _I knew it_.  The second time that her husband went to prison, she and Rusty got very good at selling nothing to a lot of people.

 

-

 

Rusty kissed Danny when they collected him from prison.

 

A full-on, fearless kiss, she remembers—it was impressive.  Rusty got him right up against the side of the car and kept him there, his fingers curling in Danny’s shirt.  Sitting in the back of Rusty’s car, she watched them in the side-view mirror and laughed a little to herself.  She would tease Rusty later about PDA and etiquette in prison parking lots.

 

Danny looked genuinely dazed when the car door finally swung open.

 

“Tess?” he croaked, catching sight of her.

 

She smiled a little.  “Hi.”

 

It was fun to see Danny, normally so collected and so suave, thrown off his charm.  He looked between her and Rusty, as though some answer might materialize for him.

 

“I didn’t think—” he started, lost his words, and tried again:  “You waited.” A shear of light fell over his shoulder. “I didn’t think you would.”

 

“Will wonders never cease?” She slid over, patting the empty space on the seat.  “C’mere.”

 

With one last glance at Rusty, who only smirked a little, Danny ducked into the car.  She kissed his bruised-looking mouth and smiled again, lingering.

 

“Hi,” she repeated, quietly.

 

“Hi.”

 

“You can thank Rusty for my waiting.”

 

Rusty huffed a laugh, sliding into the driver’s seat.  Danny looked between them again, his eyes flicking wider for half an instant before the corner of his mouth curled up.

 

“I can?” he drawled.

 

Rusty gunned the ignition and saluted both of them in the rearview.

 

“Yeah.”  She grinned.

 

Danny laughed again and shook his head.  “Unbelievable.”

 

She didn’t say anything to that; just tucked a curl of his hair behind his ear.  It was more silvered, though no less soft, than she remembered. 

 

The clunking old car pulled onto the road. Head rested on Danny’s shoulder, she watched Rusty root around, one-handed, for a bag of old gummis in the glove compartment.  Danny drew little patterns on her shoulder, these feather-light reticulations that echoed phantom etchings on the inside of her chest—the touching of a never-healing ache.

 

The world rushed past them.  She watched Rusty drive and she felt Danny’s hand; with a mournful pang she wondered where she would go without this.  How she could leave the people who knew what it was like to stagger and to fall when, really, all that they had ever wanted was to run.

 

-

 

“Let’s go,” she says to Rusty, as she’s rinsing out her mug.

 

“Go where?”

 

“I don’t know.  Wherever.  I’m tired of LA.”

 

“Alright.  I’m sure we could get into something in Texas.”

 

She laughs.  “Great. We only drove through last time.”

 

Rusty smiles.

 

Not for the first time, she selects a small amount of clothes, folds them all into little squares, and settles them inside an unremarkable suitcase.  She glances at an old clutch, left on her dresser; an ID hangs out of it.  Her face, but not her name.  She’ll leave it.

 

She pulls the zipper on the suitcase shut.

 

She is thirty-seven now, and is as sharp and as cold as she has ever been.  When she smiles, people see exactly what they want to see, and sometimes that frightens her.  She wonders what happened to that girl who started running so many years ago, chasing something just to get away from Minnesota.

 

Rusty catches her lingering over her own reflection in the mirror hung above the dresser.

 

“You okay?” he asks.

 

“Yeah.”

 

She thinks of Danny.  She thinks of bright horizons.  Her heart picks up a different rhythm in a chest that feels as though it’s entirely the wrong size.

 

She reaches for her suitcase. “Ready?”

 

Rusty grins.  “Always.”

 

In their own way, they lead each other out the door.

 


End file.
